We all know sleep is important and what we stand to lose if we don’t get enough sleep. Many books and scholarly articles talk about it. One of the latest ones I spotted was summarised by Bill Gates on his blog.
I decided to read it, and some parts caught my attention. Specifically, it talks about how to use sleep to our best advantage in terms of learning and memorising things. I thought these sleeping tips may come in useful to help my children with memorisation and improving a skill or two.
I’m sharing some of the findings I learned from the book and other studies. It’s interesting what our brain is up to when we’re asleep!
How Can Sleep Help Us Learn?
The process of learning and memorisation is three-fold:
- Acquisition – introduction of new information (only occurs during wakefulness)
- Consolidation – processes that make a memory stable (takes place during sleep)
- Recall – ability to access information after it’s stored (only occurs during wakefulness)
During different stages of sleep, specific brainwaves help with the formation of different kinds of memory. Thus, it is important to get the suggested eight hours of sleep in order to benefit from the different cognitive developments that take place during different stages of sleep.
Formation of Particular Types of Memory in Sleep Cycle
1. Sleep as an Effective Memorisation Aid
- Sleeping before learning helps to refresh our ability to make new memories.
- Even taking a nap will improve one’s capacity to memorise facts, compared to those who stay awake before memorising things.
- Sleeping shortly after learning new information has been shown to help retention.
2. Sleep Helps to Recall Forgotten Things
- Sleep helps to maintain new memories we have made.
- It also helps to regain access to things we’ve forgotten.
3. Practise Doesn’t Make Perfect; Sleep Does
- “Offline” learning occurs during a period of sleep, even for a physical skill we’re learning.
- Practise the skill prior to going to sleep. The brain helps to reinforce the newly acquired skill while we sleep.
- This is believed to happen in the last two hours of a full sleep cycle of eight hours a night. However, for those who sleep lesser than eight hours, they will miss this part of motor skill enhancement.
4. Sleep Helps To Synthesise New Ideas
- While we sleep, the brain can pull together separate pieces of stored knowledge and experiences to create new concepts.
5. Sleep Helps in Neural Recovery Effort
- Sleep helps in the recovery of bodily functions. This is useful for those who have lost some of these functions due to medical conditions.
- When we sleep, the brain begins to reconfigure these neural connections around the damaged zone.
Sleep’s Impact on Brain Functions
Sleep promotes better brain and other bodily functions that in turn translate to a healthier person as a whole. We are only able to learn better when we are in a healthy state.
Some of these benefits of sleep are shown in the diagram below.
Source: Amerisleep
Trying It Out
I’ll definitely be trying out some of these methods with my children — memorisation of the multiplication tables for my younger child and history for my elder boy just before bedtime. These are things they find difficult (maybe more of a bore!) to memorise, so it would be interesting to see how “sleeping on it” will help them get through it easier.
You could try some of it out with your children too. It can be remembering a piece on the piano or practising a dance move just before bed. This could save them lots of time and motivate them to be better self-learners once they’ve found an easy way to learn difficult things.
If You Aren’t Sleeping Enough…
“If you don’t snooze, you lose,” says the author of Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker. I’ve never been one who was interested to learn much about sleep. But this book has been entertaining with stories about the science and studies of how sleep affects memory.
If you are a night person or allow your child to stay up past his or her ideal bedtime, you may want to read the book to have a better understanding of the role of sleep. Besides the benefits on our learning ability, the book also discusses in detail the detriments of our ever-busy lifestyle that’s chronically lacking in sleep. Its delivery is quite powerful and makes you think twice about depriving yourself and your loved ones of sleep.
I’m guilty of going to bed late, and my children get to stay up late on non-school nights. After reading this, I will make an effort to adjust to a healthier way of sleeping.